Linked Data Infrastructure

How to publish my product information as Linked Data?

Good Relations Vocabulary

The best way to publish your product information is to model it with the Good Relations Vocabulary which is a popular E-Commerce vocabulary that is respected by Google and Yahoo, among others. Enriching your product web pages with the resulting RDF-a data is an effective means of Semantic Search Engine Optimization.
The next section describes this process for an exemplary product, but if you have any questions beyond that be sure to check out the video recordings of the excellent and comprehensive ISWC 2009 Tutorial: The Web of Data for E-Commerce in Brief.

Modelling your Product Data with an Example

Import the Good Relations Vocabulary

First, you need to create a new knowledge base. Go to Knowledge Bases->Edit->Create Knowledge Base. Name it http://exampleproducts.com, select Import From the Web and enter http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/goodrelations/v1.owl into the location field. Click on Save Model Configuration. The knowledge base now contains the complete Good Relations vocabulary.

Identify Attributes

For simplicity we show the modelling for just one exemplary product:

This product has the following attributes we want to model:
- Name
- Category
- Description
- Price

Find matching Classes and Properties

We now need to find the classes and properties in the Good Relations vocabulary that are equivalent to these attributes. Consulting the Product or Service section in the Good Relations documentation yields the class gr:ProductOrServiceModel, which is “A product model, i.e. a datasheet, like “Nikon T90”, “iPod Nano 16 GB”, or similar. This is basically the abstract definition of product features for mass-produced commodities.”.

Our product model now needs two classes, gr:ProductOrServiceModel being one, and one for Neclace being the other. First we look for a fitting class in Good Relations but fail to find any. The next place to go should be eClassOWL - The Web Ontology for Products and Services but even there we don’t find a fitting class. Fortunately, Wikipedia, and thus its Semantic Web counterpart DBpedia, has up-to-date entries for nearly everything and we can use http://dbpedia.org/resource/Necklace.